Clay Shirky on the future of newspapers and accountability journalism

Professor Clay Shirky spoke recently at Harvard on internet issues facing newspapers. Click here to view the video or read the transcript. It is very interesting and fascinating stuff, covering newspapers’ shrinking ability to produce accountability journalism. The focus is on the U.S. and the public good role that commercial media – in this case advertising supported newspapers – have played in accountability journalism.

I read the transcript to learn about the role that social media is playing in this…and was not disappointed. Social media disrupts the traditional role that media has played in deciding what information is bundled with the ads. Newspaper web sites by and large have mirrored the print copy of newspapers, assuming that readers would go to the web site just as they picked up a newspaper to read. With social media, that assumption no longer holds. Instead of going to the web site, people go directly to the storey, because someone in their network Twittered about it or put it on Facebook or sent a link in an email. So the audience is being assembled not by the newspaper, but by other members of the audience. Now, that’s true for me too. I spend less time on media web sites and on RSS feeds and more time on Twitter & Facebook because of the quality of information I’m getting through my social network.

There is little doubt that social media is a disruptive force in media and in advertising. Companies born digital are taking on more social dynamics into their business model. Take Google for instance, having just released an experiment with search going social.

Professor Shirky’s presentation goes into the public good generated by the social distribution of news online. The public good comes from republication and reuse on a scale that was not feasible from just hard copy print alone.

People can share or forward commercially produced articles online very easily right now, but for how long is unclear.  If newspapers put news and information behind a pay wall, that would block republication and reuse. But then, as Shirky says, the internet enables non-commercial models for news and information production and distribution, including socially produced material. So whatever newspapers do, they will need to rebalance with these alternatives. But the uncertainty is whether the alternative models will be effective substitutes for accountability journalism. Shirky thinks a transitional problem is looming due to the rapid decline of the newspaper industry (particularly in the U.S.); and the uncertainty about the nature and length of time of the intervening period until the (or whether the) social media ecosystem has evolved to fill the gap, particularly in respect of local journalism.

Future of Influence and more on Government 2.0

You may recall that I’ve posted a number of times on rise of ‘new influencers’ in social media. So the seminar on The Future of Influence held last Tuesday was not to be missed. Held in San Francisco and Sydney simultaneously (linked via Skype Video) there was a lively bunch of speakers, panellists and audience interaction. I’m putting up my notes from the summit in this posting along with some info about social media and influence that came my way subsequently. I’ve also drawn on the Twitter hashtag #foi09 used for the seminar as another reference in putting this posting together.

The event used to called The Future of Media, with the name change reflecting where marketing and content business interest now lies…or perhaps should lie. Interestingly, the name change resulted in a down-shift in participation in Sydney and an uplift in San Francisco, an outcome that Ross Dawson put down to “things needing to be successful overseas before they are accepted in Australia”.   Interesting indeed. That sentiment is consistent with what Duncan Riley (editor of Inquistor) has said about Australia being about five years behind the USA in the use of social media.

Anyway, here are some messages that came out of the seminar:

• another reminder of the importance of digital media literacy: find good info online (good as in credible, accurate and believable) by looking into what others say about the author or the posting, how many people have bookmarked the item, how many people liked the posting; and for building personal learning networks online
• the community is becoming more influenced by itself than by “leaders” or top-down, push media
• moving away from push media and replacing audience measurement with measuring influence, advertisers are particularly interested in the ability to inspire action.  Advertisers need to define what behaviour they want to influence and measure that, and be actively engaged in what the community is saying in social media
• Government interest in social media is in what can be done to move their policies and ideas. Politics is providing a learning ground for the effectiveness of social media influence that will in turn influence what business does in social media([and I would add in government agencies)
• effective engagement in social media is about understanding the target community context and the people in the community, and that requires skills and abilities in sociology and psychology
• broadcasters are becoming more reliant on receiving content from social media (eg. Twitter & YouTube) and re-distributing it relative to generating and distributing their own content
• charging for online content is likely to shift more attention to social media, public media and sponsored media
• developments in the semantic web and social media content aggregation will drive moe personalisation of media (that combine/integrate professional and social content)
• tools to search with on social media include: Google Alert, Google Trends, Google Blogs, Facebook Lexicon, Tweetfeel, TwitterCounter, theDailyInfluence, SocialMention, Wotnews and Technorati.
• techniques to gauge how influential people are include the size of their social graph, follower/friends counts and activity levels and blog post comments.

Being a social media summit there has been a lot put out about the event already. Examples are from Ross Dawson, Mick Liubinskas and Xavier Vespa.

In some developments over the course of today, TechCrunch posted about identifying the most influential and connected Twitter users. The article has some more data on the amazing speed in Twitter take-up over the last few months. The Web Ecology Project published a report  called Analysing Influence on Twitter where influence on Twitter is defined as “the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user”.  Actions include retweets, replies, mentions and attributions. On the basis of new methodology applied by The Web Ecology Project, mashable is more influential than CNN, but news outlets (regardless of follower count) influence large amounts of followers to republish their content to other users.

Finally, I met a number of interesting people at the summit, including Tim Martin. Tim is the director of 2 Sticks Digital Marketing, a Melbourne-based consultancy providing advise on online community building and engagement and other things. Have a look around Two Sticks web site to get a feel for digital marketing in practice.

Government 2.0

There was a publicsphere event held in Sydney today, see #nswsphere on Twitter. I viewed Premier Rees presentation over the live video stream hosted by the NSW Parliament. Premier Rees announced a new information sharing policy initiative as part of the NSW Government’s commitment to fostering an ‘Open Government’. One particularly interesting observation from the Premier was that one of the main challenges in achieving greater openness in government is to overcome the culture of secrecy and control in government agencies. Again, interesting indeed.

Monetising media and the future of journalism

Well, it seems to me that Rupert Murdoch hasn’t realised that content is no longer scarce. Content is created in many places and the marginal cost of distributing it is close to zero. According to Universal McCann’s Wave 4 report, social networks are becoming the dominant platform for content creation and content sharing. That said, I do think there is value in professionally produced content that people will be willing to pay for. Kevin Kelly has an excellent piece on eight value generators: immediacy, personalisation, interpretation, authenticity, embodiment, patronage and findability. There is plenty of incentive there to motivate people to part with some money – as long as its not complex or uncertain. There is some work to do on formulating the right mix of subscription and transaction charges.

And the question remains, how much are people willing to pay? Moreover, the same question may well apply to TV (see the Razorfish Digital Outlook Report 2009 chapter TV at a crossroads. After all, advertising revenue is moving from broadcasting to online as well, as well as the fragmentation problem from multiple channels, time shifting and so on.

I came across a video of a US panel session on newspapers & the future of media via Gerd Leonhard, a media futurist. Click on the Gerd link to view the first 10 minutes of the session, or view the full one hour session (or part thereof) on FORA.tv.

The event was hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California. All four panellists – from a newspaper, community funded reporting start-up, media aggregation start-up and academia – agreed that the traditional newspaper business model is toast but that journalism will remain a force. I’ve noted a good level of interest about trends in the newspaper sector and the future of journalism more generally. The panellists have an excellent knowledge of the media and cover some interesting emerging and potential developments. Can I recommend the full program to those of you with such an interest.

The newspaper representative said that the old newspaper model of 80% revenue from advertising and 20% from circulation is certainly dead. But he seems to think that print will be around for a while yet. Other interesting comments made by panellists were that:

• people still want content - people feel more connected to the community through access to content - it is the packaging that is changing
• there are likely to be different models to suit different audiences
• professional journalists can collaborate with citizen journalists, adding value in the process
• other forms of professional content, citizen journalism and consumer interaction are likely to focus on personalising media aggregation and sharing.

The community funded content outfit is Spot Us, an online “market place where independent reporters, community members & news organisations can come together & collaborate”. Kachingle is the start-up exploring new ways to monetise content on the basis of personal selection/preference aggregation.